Michael Lewis

BOOMERANG

The Meltdown Tour

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
TCommons License.
Lewis is a financial journalist. Here he reports his experiences of
interviewing people in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the USA who
have been involved in the current financial catastrophe.

We start in Iceland, whose extraordinary landscape Lewis catches
well. The Icelandic bankers displayed a degree of over-optimism and
consequent recklessness in investment that sets the tone for the rest of
the places Lewis visits. In Iceland's case the underlying cause, he
thinks, was the machismo that characterised Icelandic society. The
future of the country, he suggests, lies with its women.

From Iceland we go to Greece. In this chapter the focus is mostly not on
Athens, as one might expect, but on the Vatopaidi monastery on Mount
Athos. This is not because Lewis is religious—he isn't—but because
the monks, whose shrewdness impressed him considerably, had apparently
been involved in a shady-sounding financial deal with the Greek
government that had netted them a large profit. They succeeded in
exchanging a lake that had no commercial value for government-owned
owned properties that had a lot. Lewis spent much of his time in Greece
investigating this murky affair.

Next, Ireland, with its acres of unfinished and finished but unlettable
properties standing empty. It is difficut to know which is more
astonishing: the suddenness of the Irish boom or the equal suddenness of
its crash. Lewis does a pretty good job of making this rise and fall
comprehensible, but as one who knew Ireland well in the 1950s and early
1960s, I still find the story hard to take in.

And so to Germany, perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book. Two
surprising features of German life emerge: an obsession with scatology
and a remarkable degree of incompetence in the German banking system
that is hard to reconcile with German financial prudence in other
respects. But most striking of all is the total inability of Germans and
Greeks to understand each other. An official in the German Finance
Ministry put it bluntly, saying that "if the Greeks and the Germans were
to coexist in a financial union, the Greeks needed to change who they
are." Since this is not going to happen, of course, the current loan
negotiations with Greece cannot but end in disaster.

The final chapter, set in the USA, I found the least interesting. There
is a lengthy interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger and an account of the
financial collapse of an American town called Vallejo. All this would
probably mean more to an American reader than it does to a European.

The tone of the book is rightly described in the blurb as tragicomic.
Voltaire remarked that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy
to those who feel. Lewis manages to straddle the gulf quite well, but
for the Greeks the comic aspect of their situation is all but
imperceptible.